Resources

Encyclopedias

Oxford Music Online*

Oxford Music Online is the access point for Oxford music reference subscriptions and products online. These include:

The New Grove Dictionary and its spinoffs

Grove Music Online has been the leading online resource for music research since its inception in 2001, a compendium of music scholarship offering the full texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition (2002), and The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition (forthcoming), as well as numerous subsequent updates and emendations. It includes more than 50,000 signed articles and 30,000 biographies contributed by over 6,000 scholars from around the world.

Encyclopedia of Popular Music

The online version of Colin Larkin’s critically acclaimed 10-volume The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th edition, contains 27,000 entries and over 6,000 new entries. Featuring a broad musical scope covering popular music of all genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music, the Encyclopedia also offers thousands of additional entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals. Key dates, biographies, and further reading are provided for artists covered, along with complete discographies that include record labels, release dates, and a 5-star album rating system.

The Oxford Dictionary of Music

A guide for all music lovers and performers, both amateur and professional,The Oxford Dictionary of Music brings together 12,500 entries covering musical subjects of all kinds in an authoritative and accessible way.

The Oxford Companion to Music

Contains articles that range from musical ideas and terms to surveys of musical forms and styles, covering a wide breadth of musical topics, including theory, aesthetics, performance practice, jazz, popular music, and dance. The Companion offers a concentrated focus on the Western classic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Included are over 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres.

The Oxford History of Western Music online offers an account of the evolution of Western classical music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists, Richard Taruskin. The full text, which was printed in five thick volumes, is available in an interactive digital format. The online version includes all 1.25 million words, 500 images, and 1,800 musical examples from the updated paperback edition with sophisticated search and browse functionality designed to maximize the dynamic possibilities of online reading and research. Taruskin’s text is accompanied by editorially selected links to relevant articles in Grove Music Online. The selection of links follows the course of Taruskin’s narrative through each era of Western music.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship. The subjects covered seem somewhat eclectic (e.g. a guide to Messiaen but not one to Mozart, one on orchestral music but not on opera), but more are being published at a fairly rapid rate.

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is the first comprehensive online resource devoted to music of all the world’s peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world, make this the most complete body of work focused on world music. The Encyclopedia includes audio and video examples via playlists, which are themed collections of materials and can be created by any user of the database. Users can create playlists containing whole videos, tracks, segments (clips) and/or other items such as links to any URL. Playlists can be annotated, edited, copied, shared, and all playlists contain their own unique static URL. Playlists can be used as lists of personal favorites, class viewing/listening assignments, or as a teaching resource for in-class use.

Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) is a general encyclopedia of music, entirely in German. MGG is encyclopedic in the true sense of that term: it offers in-depth articles on every aspect of music as well as many related areas such as literature, philosophy, and visual arts. MGG Online contains the second print edition of MGG, published from 1994 to 2008, as well as current, continuous online updates and additions.

Journal Articles – Citation

Produced by Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Inc. (RILM), RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text (RAFT) enhances the bibliography of writings on music provided by RILM Abstracts with the addition of approximately one million pages of full-text content from more than 200 periodicals from 50 countries in 40 languages, published from the early 20th century to the present (many of which are not found in our other full-text offerings). Most coverage commences with the first issue of the journal and includes cover-to-cover full text for every included title. Therefore, in addition to scholarly articles and reviews, the database includes obituaries, editorials, correspondence, advertisements, news items, and more. Coverage of Conference Proceedings goes back to 1835.

The Music Index: A Subject-Author Guide to Music Periodical Literature is compiled from over 655 international music periodicals offering the researcher access to a wealth of historiographic, ethnographic, and musicological data. A broad range of subjects is covered, including past and present personalities, the history of music, forms and types of music, musical instruments from the earliest times to modern electronic instruments, plus computer produced music. In addition, book reviews, reviews of music recordings, tapes, and performances are indexed. First performances and obituaries are noted.

Répertoire International De La Presse Musicale (International Inventory Of The Musical Press) is one of four international cooperative bibliographic undertakings in music, alongside Le Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM), Le Répertoire international de littérature musicale (RILM, above), and Le Répertoire international d’iconographie musicale (RIdIM). RIPM indexes only 19th century periodicals, but in a much more scholarly way than any other index. This multi-lingual index has been appearing as separate paper indexes since 1988, but this online index collocates what had become a somewhat unwieldy index at over 150 volumes. The hard copy volumes are still kept in Reference (ML128.P24 R24 and then alphabetical by title of the individual journal indexed).

Journal Articles – Full Text

Produced by Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Inc. (RILM), RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text (RAFT) enhances the bibliography of writings on music provided by RILM Abstracts with the addition of approximately one million pages of full-text content from more than 200 periodicals from 50 countries in 40 languages, published from the early 20th century to the present (many of which are not found in our other full-text offerings). Most coverage commences with the first issue of the journal and includes cover-to-cover full text for every included title. Therefore, in addition to scholarly articles and reviews, the database includes obituaries, editorials, correspondence, advertisements, news items, and more. Coverage of Conference Proceedings goes back to 1835.

JSTOR is a cooperative venture among 1400 international libraries and publishers to provide full-text access to older scholarly journals. The most recent year of a particular journal is not covered, but those journals that are included have full text accessibility back to their respective origins. At the moment, no music-specific journals are included, but that will be changing in the future. Users will find an astonishing number of scholarly articles about musical topics that have been published in the hundreds of non-music journals and books indexed. Further, there are 72 music-specific journals for which coverage is provided.

Currently, Project MUSE® offers nearly 200 quality journal titles from some 30 scholarly publishers. As one of the academic community’s primary electronic periodicals resources, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. Unlike JSTOR, the emphasis is on current periodical literature. Most journals included are not referenced back to their beginnings. At present, these are the music periodicals covered: Computer Music Journal, Latin American Music Review, Leonardo Music Journal, Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association, and The Opera Quarterly.

Répertoire International De La Presse Musicale (International Inventory Of The Musical Press) is one of four international cooperative bibliographic undertakings in music, alongside Le Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM), Le Répertoire international de littérature musicale (RILM, above), and Le Répertoire international d’iconographie musicale (RIdIM). RIPM indexes only 19th century periodicals, but in a much more scholarly way than any other index. This multi-lingual index has been appearing as separate paper indexes since 1988, but this online index collocates what had become a somewhat unwieldy index at over 150 volumes. The hard copy volumes are still kept in Reference (ML128.P24 R24 and then alphabetical by title of the individual journal indexed).

Excellent coverage of the popular press, from music magazines such as Rolling Stone to more general publications like Playboy and U.S. News & World Report. Full-text is available only for all recent publications (1999-present), but the backfile (1986-1998) and “deep backfile” (pre-1986) include citations and often abstracts, and occasionally full-text.

LexisNexis allows online, full-text access to many of the world’s most important newspapers, including the New York Times, The Times (London), The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many others.

Dissertations

This database is the world’s most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997. Note that not all institutions submit DMA dissertations.

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM) is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines. Currently containing over 14,000 records, including the corrected and updated contents of all earlier printed editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology and supplements contributed from musicological centers throughout the world, the database is fully searchable. Please note that DDM does not include the dissertations themselves.

Other Music Resources

RISM is an international collective undertaking with the aim of comprehensively documenting surviving music sources anywhere in the world. Established in 1952 by the International Musicological Society and International Association of Music Libraries. The goal of RISM is to locate and catalog all surviving musical sources dating from the earliest times to about 1800, and in doing so to bring them to the attention of a much wider public.

Series A/II: Music manuscripts after 1600, is a database offers around 700,000 mainly manuscript sources cataloged in detail according to academic criteria. The manuscripts are currently stored in hundreds of libraries and archives around the world. They pass down to later generations the musical works of 30,000 composers. The catalog was made possible through cooperation between the International Inventory of Musical Sources (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, RISM for short), the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and the State Library of Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). The catalog entries comprise, among other things, information about the composers (including dates of birth and death), title, instrumentation and casting requirements of the works, as well as references to them in the specialist literature. The manuscripts themselves are described in detail in respect of scribe, and place and time of origin. In addition, practically every work can also be identified unambiguously by means of a music incipit. A variety of search fields makes it possible to investigate not only according to particular composers, work titles, or performance forces, but also by place and time of origin or various people like librettists, previous owners, or dedicatees.

Musical America is a directory of artist managers, orchestras, opera companies, concert series, festivals, competitions, music schools and departments, record companies, venues, services, and performing arts products worldwide. Over 14,000 entries include names, email addresses, websites, and other contact information. Musical America also functions as a clearinghouse for arts- and industry-related news, and has a Career Center highlighting jobs in the arts.

Local Resources

Eastman Scores Publishing is a new way the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester is bringing music to the world: offering high quality reprint editions of scores from its premier research and performance collections held in the Sibley Music Library. These scores can be found in the University of Rochester’s Digital Repository UR Research.

While free digital availability of these scores is a wonderful service of the library, single-sheet home printouts often do not work well on music stands for performers. This site offers for sale a selection of Sibley’s digitized scores, digitally edited to remove marks and blemishes, printed on sturdy paper, and bound as sheet music pamphlets. Sibley Music Library’s Conservation Department has long experience in providing such pamphlets as preservation copies to replace brittle scores, whose acidic paper is literally crumbling to bits. The Library’s experience in making preservation copies is now put to good use in providing musicians and other libraries print-on-demand copies from our digital collection.

This new Print-on-Demand collection is currently limited to sheet music that can be bound as pamphlets. We are investigating ways that longer scores can also be made available in cost-effective reprints.. We hope you enjoy the scores, and invite your feedback and suggestions for new publications from Sibley Music Library’s digitized material.